The question of Scottish independence has never been fully settled. For more than three hundred years, since the Act of Union of 1707 joined the Scottish and English Parliaments into one, there has been a strand of Scottish political life that rejected that union — sometimes as a mainstream political force, sometimes as a minority tradition, but never as a spent one.
Today, following the 2014 independence referendum and the Brexit that has changed the constitutional landscape, the question is alive again in ways that make the resolution of the 1707 union look more contingent, and more contested, than it has seemed for decades.
The Act of Union: A Contested Bargain (1707)
The Act of Union that created the Kingdom of Great Britain on 1 May 1707 was not a product of popular enthusiasm in Scotland. The Scottish Parliament voted itself out of existence by 110 votes to 69 — a majority, but not a comfortable one, and obtained in circumstances that included systematic bribery of Scottish parliamentarians with English gold.
The Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 — the latter led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose advance south reached as far as Derby before retreating — represented the most dramatic expressions of Scottish and English Jacobite rejection of the Hanoverian succession that the union entailed. The defeat at Culloden in 1746, and the brutal pacification of the Highlands that followed, effectively ended armed resistance to the union.
Yet the union always incorporated a degree of Scottish distinctiveness that made it different from simple absorption. Scotland retained its own legal system (Scots law), its own church (the Church of Scotland), its own education system, and its own banknotes. These institutional differences kept a distinctly Scottish public sphere alive even as Scottish and British identity merged in the minds of most Scots through the nineteenth century.
Scottish Nationalism in the Modern Era (1934–1979)
The Scottish National Party was founded in 1934 through the merger of the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party. For its first four decades it was a fringe force in Scottish politics — committed to independence but without the electoral support to advance it.
The discovery of North Sea oil in the late 1960s transformed the political arithmetic of independence. The SNP's slogan "It's Scotland's Oil" captured a simple and powerful argument: that Scotland subsidised the rest of the UK, and that an independent Scotland could be prosperous. The February 1974 general election returned seven SNP MPs; the October 1974 election returned eleven, making the SNP the third party by seats in Scotland.
The 1979 devolution referendum — which asked Scottish voters whether they wanted a Scottish Assembly — produced a majority yes vote but not the 40 per cent of the total electorate required by the Cunningham amendment. The Assembly was not established; the SNP brought down the Callaghan government in the subsequent confidence vote; Thatcher was elected; devolution was shelved for twenty years.
The Road to Devolution (1979–1999)
The Thatcher years were paradoxically good for Scottish nationalism. The poll tax — introduced in Scotland a year before England, as a testing ground — became a symbol of the democratic deficit: a policy deeply unpopular in Scotland imposed without a Scottish mandate. The collapse of Scottish support for the Conservatives, which had been the dominant party in much of Scotland through the 1950s, created the space for Labour's long dominance and a growing demand for a Scottish Parliament.
The 1997 devolution referendum — conducted by Tony Blair's newly elected Labour government — produced a decisive yes vote: 74 per cent for a Scottish Parliament, 63 per cent for that Parliament having tax-varying powers. The Scottish Parliament was established in 1999, meeting first in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland while the purpose-built Holyrood building was under construction.
Devolution was intended by its architects to settle the independence question — "to kill nationalism stone dead," as George Robertson, then Scottish Secretary, infamously put it. The opposite occurred. The Scottish Parliament gave nationalism an institutional base and a platform; it gave Scottish voters an alternative to Westminster; it made a political landscape in which the SNP could eventually govern.
The SNP in Power and the Path to Referendum (2007–2014)
The SNP won the 2007 Scottish Parliament election by a single seat, forming a minority government under Alex Salmond. It was the first time a party committed to independence had governed Scotland. The SNP government used its platform to demonstrate that independence supporters could govern competently and to build the case for a referendum.
The 2011 election produced an SNP majority — something the proportional voting system for Holyrood was specifically designed to prevent. With a majority, Salmond had the democratic mandate for a referendum. Negotiations with the Cameron government produced the Edinburgh Agreement of 2012, which transferred the power to hold a legal referendum to the Scottish Parliament.
The independence referendum of 18 September 2014 produced a 55.3 per cent No vote on a turnout of 84.6 per cent — the highest turnout in any UK election since 1910. The union was preserved, but the margin was closer than most unionists had expected a year earlier, when polling had shown independence support at around 35 per cent.
Brexit and the Changed Landscape (2016–present)
The Brexit referendum of June 2016 changed the constitutional landscape in ways that the 2014 result had not anticipated. Scotland voted 62 per cent to remain in the European Union; England voted 53.4 per cent to leave. Scotland was taken out of the EU against the expressed will of its voters — a development that the SNP argued fundamentally changed the terms under which the independence question had been settled in 2014.
Nicola Sturgeon, who had succeeded Salmond as SNP leader and First Minister in 2014, demanded a second independence referendum. The UK government — under Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer in succession — refused. The constitutional impasse that resulted has not been resolved.
Support for independence, which had settled at around 45 per cent in the years after 2014, moved above 50 per cent in polling for sustained periods following Brexit. The 2021 Holyrood election returned a majority of pro-independence MSPs. The 2024 UK general election, paradoxically, complicated the picture: the SNP lost many of its Westminster seats to Labour, reducing but not eliminating its parliamentary presence and raising questions about the timing of any independence push.
Scotland in 2026: Where Does the Movement Stand?
In 2026, Scottish independence is simultaneously more supported — in terms of polling — and further from immediate achievement than at any point since 2014. The legal route to a referendum requires either UK government consent (not forthcoming) or a constitutional innovation that the courts have yet to validate.
The demographic trajectory, consistently, points toward independence. Younger Scots, and those who moved to Scotland from other EU countries (many of whom have remained despite Brexit), support independence at rates well above the overall average. As older, more unionist voters age out of the electorate, the polling arithmetic is expected to shift.
What is less clear is whether the path to a referendum — legal, legitimate, and binding — can be found in the current constitutional framework, and whether independence support would survive the rigorous scrutiny of a formal campaign. The 2014 experience suggests that the gap between polling support for independence and referendum victory is significant, and that the economic case — what currency, what central bank, what relationship with the EU — requires answers that the current moment of geopolitical and economic uncertainty makes harder to give.
The question of Scottish independence is, as it has always been, a question about the future Britain wants, and the future Scotland can build. It has never been more live, and it has never been less certain how it will be resolved.
